《英语流行话题阅读:语境识词3500》Unit 24 雷德湖高中校园枪击事件

　　Unit 24

Red Lake High School Shooting

On March 23, 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather, 58-year-old police officer Daryl Lussier, and the man's 32-year-old girlfriend wit a 22-caliber gun before taking his pistol and a shotgun, bulletproof vest and squad 1 car to Red Lake Senior High School in an Indian reservation near the Canadian border.

As Weise entered the school through a doorway 2 with a metal detector 3, he shot to death Derrick Brun, an unarmed guard. Then Weise shot at 62-year-old teacher Neva Rogers, as well as some students, who fled into a classroom. He chased them and opened fire, killing 4 Rogers and 5 students, injuring 14 boys, and then continued to wander through the school, firing randomly 5. The 7 death toll 6 made it the nation's worst school shooting since April 1999, when two students killed 12 classmates, a teacher and then themselves at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Four police officers entered, and Weise fired on them as well. At least one officer returned fire, but it was unknown whether Weise was wounded. Shortly afterward 7, Weise went back into the classroom and shot himself in the head. There was no suicide note.

Weise was from the Ojibwa tribe, also known as the Chippewa, one of the poorest Indian tribes in Minnesota. His father committed suicide in 2001 and his mother stays in an old men's home for serious brain-damage in a traffic accident.

It was later reported that a person who had posted on the site of the Libertarian National Socialist 8 Green Party identified himself as "Jeff Weise, from the Red Lake Indian Reservation." The writer said he disliked interracial mixing among the American Indians.

The Libertarian National Socialist Green Party issued a statement on its site confirming that Weise posted messages there. The writer of those messages had tow user names: "NativeNazi" and Todesengel," which mean "Angel of Death" in German. "I stumbled across the site in my study of the Third Reich as well as Nazism," says a March 2004 post. "I guess I've always carried a natural admiration 10 for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations."

Another 2004 posting says, "As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing, there is barely any full-blooded Natives left. Where I live, less than 1 percent of all the people on the reservation can speak their own language... Under a National Socialist government, things for us would improve vastly," it said. "That is why I am pro-Nazi. It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist; people are so misinformed, ignorant and close minded; it makes your life a living hell."

NativeNazi also said he was a member of the Ojibwa tribe and "both my parents were Native American, though from what I understand I also have a little German, a little Irish and a little French Canadian in my blood as well."

The idea of Weise's joining a neo-Nazi group is not surprising. In America people constantly run across Jewish Nazis 9, gay Nazis, blacks who wanted to be white supremacists -- these are powerless people to whom images of powerful people are attractive.